Landscapes of the Soul: A Book You’ll Return to Again and Again

How Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw show us the God who meets us in every terrain of faith.

Attachment has become one of the defining notes of our age. We hear of the need for a non-anxious presence in leadership, of attachment therapy in counselling, and of the psychological turn that has placed bonds and belonging at the centre of our well-being. The language of attachment is now woven through our conversations about health, growth, and human flourishing. Yet within Christian spirituality—most notably in the Ignatian tradition—attachment has long been central: the call to be rightly attached to God and neighbour, and to grow in holy indifference toward all that binds us wrongly.

The question that presses around us at this moment, then, is whether our modern understandings of attachment can be held within a theological (i.e Christian) frame: do they illuminate, or even deepen, the Christian vision of spiritual formation? And how might the God who made us for attachment be the very one who heals and perfects it in Christ?

Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw’s Landscapes of the Soul answers these questions and is one of the primary reasons to read their book.

But there are even more.

Mortimer Adler, in his classic How to Read a Book, makes a simple but arresting observation: most books, if we are honest, are read once and left behind. They are useful, perhaps even enjoyable, but they do not stay and remain present to us. A few, however, become companions. We return to them again and again, finding new depths, fresh insights, and unexpected consolations. They grow us and grow with us.

Landscapes of the Soul is one such book.

This is not merely another manual on spiritual growth. It speaks in a different register altogether. Here is a book that will read you, even as you read it—laying bare the ways we falter and stall, and tenderly pointing to paths of renewal and breakthrough. For many, it may prove to be a most significant companion, disclosing why our longings for God so often drift into detours, diversions, and spiritual cul-de-sacs—and how, by grace, we might find our way again.

The Journey of Attachment and Repair

Photo by Tim Trad on Unsplash

At the heart of Landscapes of the Soul lies a compelling premise: the attachment styles we form early in life do not remain confined to our human relationships—they profoundly shape how we relate to God. Whether we know it or not, the ways we learned to connect—or protect ourselves—in childhood echo in our prayer life, our worship, our expectations of church, and even in the very image of God we carry within.

To make this both memorable and personal, Cyd and Geoff Holsclaw give us four metaphors, drawn from the natural world, that describe the “landscapes” of faith. In the jungle, faith is anxious, always scanning for danger and fearing abandonment. In the desert, faith becomes avoidant, withdrawing from intimacy and keeping God at arm’s length. In the war zone, chaos reigns, trust is fragile, and relationships feel unpredictable and unsafe. Yet there is also the pasture—the lush meadow of secure attachment, where joy and peace take root under the care of the Good Shepherd. These images are not caricatures and clichéd tropes, but invitations: each of us will recognise something of our own inner terrain in them.

The book unfolds in three parts. Part One, “Good Roots,” describes God’s original design for attachment, showing how joy, intimacy, independence, and the triad of faith, hope, and love were meant to form the bedrock of our spiritual lives. Part Two, “Gone Wrong,” traces how those designs become distorted through anxious, avoidant, or chaotic patterns of attachment, and how these distortions spill into our life with God. Finally, Part Three, “God’s Repair,” offers the healing found in Christ: baptism as a new grounding in joy, walking with Jesus as intimacy and independence are restored, and even the trials and deaths we endure become occasions for deeper faith, hope, and love.

In all this, the Holsclaws integrate psychology and theology with remarkable clarity: attachment theory becomes not merely an explanatory framework, but a way of seeing how Christ himself repairs and re-forms our inner landscapes.

And for me, this is the most vital part of their work, the Christocentric beating heart to it all.

From Roots to Repair: Mapping the Landscapes of the Soul

Photo by Eastman Childs on Unsplash

Let me trace the contours of the book’s main sections, before pausing to reflect on what they might mean for my own enduring passion—the Ignatian Exercises.

Part One: Good Roots

The first movement, Good Roots, draws us back to God’s original design for human attachment. At our very core, we are fashioned for joy: to see and be seen; to live in intimacy and trust, yet also to grow in independence and responsibility. These are not decorative extras in the life of faith. They are the very soil in which it is planted. The Holsclaws gently show how faith, hope, and love germinate and flourish in secure attachment. What might look, at first sight, like the language of neuroscience is in fact theology at its most embodied—an anthropology rooted in God’s intention, where humanity is envisioned as joyful, loving, and resilient in hope in God.

Part Two: Gone Wrong

The second movement, Gone Wrong, describes what happens when these roots are disrupted or distorted. Here, the metaphors carry their weight. The jungle of anxiety, the desert of avoidance, the war zone of chaos—these are not distant abstractions, but landscapes many of us will recognise in our own spiritual lives (and might require an illustrated version of the book :-). Each describes a way in which our survival strategies become our spirituality. The descriptions are unsettling precisely because they ring true and resonate as maps of our daily lived experiences with God.

Yet the Holsclaws never lapse into judgment or despair. Instead, these chapters are suffused and saturated with a pastoral tenderness, reminding us that Christ does not wait for us in some imagined neutrality of faith, but meets us exactly where we are—in the jungle, the desert, or the war zone. To notice and name these places is not to condemn ourselves, but to begin the journey toward healing.

Part Three: God’s Repair

The final movement, God’s Repair, turns our gaze firmly toward Christ, who mends what is fractured. The tone here becomes deeply theological. Christ’s baptism and ours are reframed as a new rooting in joy; walking with Jesus restores the balance of intimacy and independence; trials and testings shape faith, hope, and love; even death itself is transfigured—not as rupture, but as the passage into life. In Christ, the scattered and broken attachments of our lives are gathered up, healed, and re-secured.

Repair means that we are not left to wander in jungles, deserts, or war zones, but are drawn into pasture—the rich landscape of love, where the soul rests under the gaze of the Good Shepherd. In fact, reading A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23, by Philip Keller, might be the best devotional reading alongside Landscapes.

Principle, Disorder, Participation: An Ignatian Reading of the Soul’s Landscapes

How might Landscapes of the Soul stand alongside the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, giving them fresh depth and inviting us to live more fully into their vision? And just as much, how might the Ignatian way itself steady and undergird the vision of Landscapes? Two companions on the same road, each illuminating the soul’s terrain from a related but different angle.

Part One: Good Roots — Principle and Foundation

The launching point of Ignatian spirituality is that God loves us fiercely, passionately, and unconditionally. Because of this love, God’s desires and hopes for us are based on who we are: our gifts, talents, preferences, and joys. What God wants for us is the same as our deepest desires. - Fred Galano

The first movement, Good Roots, draws us back to God’s original design for human attachment. At our very core, we are fashioned for joy: to see and be seen; to live in intimacy and trust, yet also to grow in independence and responsibility. These are not incidental to faith. They are the very soil in which it grows. The Holsclaws gently show how faith, hope, and love germinate and flourish in secure attachment. What might appear as neuroscience is also deeply theological and biblical at its most embodied: a vision of humanity as God intended—rooted in joy, resilient in hope, capable of love.

Here, the Ignatian resonance is clear. The Spiritual Exercises begin with the Principle and Foundation, a reminder that we are created for God’s love, and that everything else in our lives must find its place in relation to this truth. The Holsclaws’ account of joy and secure attachment is a contemporary echo of this same foundation.

Part Two: Gone Wrong — Disordered Attachments & God In All Things

The second movement, Gone Wrong, draws us into the landscapes where our roots have been disrupted or distorted. The metaphors are so vivid, and they resonate. The jungle of anxiety, the desert of avoidance, the war zone of chaos—these are not distant abstractions, but terrains many of us will quietly recognise in our own lives. They describe the survival strategies that, over time, have often hardened into the shape of our spirituality.

Ignatius insisted that God is to be found in all things—in joy and in sorrow, in success and failure, in desire and in sin. Our attachments gather and form in these very places, clustering into jungles, deserts, and war zones. Yet the Holsclaws remind us that Christ does not wait for us in some imagined neutrality of faith. He meets us where we are, and in naming these landscapes, we do not condemn ourselves; we open the door to healing.

Ignatius spoke of “disordered attachments”—those loves and fears that pull us away from God. His invitation was to notice where consolation and desolation are leading: toward God or away around our attachments. The Holsclaws’ landscapes offer us much the same gift, furnishing a language and imagination for the hidden attachments that quietly govern our faith.

Part Three: God’s Repair — Participation in Christ

But Jesus doesn’t just show us the way to deepen our attachment. He is the way. In his full divinity, Jesus becomes our attachment figure, offering us deep attachment. “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, nlt).

The final movement, God’s Repair, turns our gaze toward Christ, who alone can mend our fractured attachments. At its core, the Holsclaws’ argument is that our insecure attachments—whether anxious, avoidant, or chaotic—are not repaired by self-effort, but by entering into a relationship with Christ. This is more than imitation; it is participation. In baptism, in prayer, in discipleship, Christ’s intimacy with the Father becomes our intimacy. Their vision of God’s Repair is, in essence, participatory: our fractured attachments are taken up into Christ’s secure attachment to the Father, so that his life becomes ours.

While the Holsclaws frame their insights primarily through attachment theory and pastoral practice, their theology is implicitly participatory in nature. What they describe as secure attachment in Christ is, theologically speaking, union and participation in the life of God through Christ.

Ignatius would also call this “participation.” The Exercises invite us to walk with Christ in his life, death, and resurrection, and to find God in all things. Likewise, the Holsclaws remind us that healing does not come through technique or willpower, but through being drawn into Christ’s story, where our own stories are re-membered and redeemed.

Here, I found myself longing for more—more theological exploration of how participation in Christ works itself out in our attachments. But that is my own impetus to continue to pursue, spurred on by this excellent book.